Budgeting a Community Website: What to Put In, Per Door

There is a difference between finding out what a website costs and getting one approved. Most pricing articles, including ours, answer the first question. This one is for the second.

If you are a marketing coordinator, a community manager, or a regional putting next year's numbers together, you are not really buying anything. You are writing a line that somebody above you has to defend. That person thinks in cost per door, not in project totals, and a project total is the worst possible way to present this purchase.

Convert it to per door before anyone else does

A one-time website build divided across the doors it serves is a small number. Here is the same purchase expressed the way an approver reads it.

A 200-unit community buying a $2,500 site is spending twelve dollars and fifty cents per door, once. That is a rounding error against almost any other line in a marketing budget, and it is a permanent asset rather than a monthly spend. Worth noting on the care plan column: the first year is included with the build, so the recurring number does not hit the budget until the following year.

Where the line goes

Marketing budgets in this industry are usually built as a percentage of gross potential rent, and the website sits inside that as a capital-flavored one-time item plus a small recurring one. Two practical notes:

• Split the line. Put the build in as a one-time project cost and the care plan in as a recurring monthly expense. Combining them makes the number look like a subscription, which is the exact thing you are trying to avoid buying.
• Anchor it against advertising. Most communities spend more on paid advertising in a single month than a website costs once. If your community spends anything meaningful on ILS listings or paid search, put those two numbers next to each other. The comparison makes the case without you having to argue.

A budget line you can paste

Steal this and change the numbers:

Community website, one-time build. $2,500. Replaces the current property page with a dedicated site owned by ownership, including floor plans, photo gallery, availability, and online tour and application flows connected to our existing property management software. Includes first year of hosting and support. Recurring cost begins in year two at $99 per month.

The words that do the work there are "owned by ownership" and "connected to our existing property management software." The first tells your approver this is an asset, not a rental. The second tells them nothing operational is about to break, which is the question they will actually ask.

What you will get asked

Three questions come up almost every time, so have the answers ready.

• Do we not already have a website? Usually the answer is that the community appears as a listing on the management company's site, which is not the same thing and does not rank for the community's own name.
• Will this break our applications or payments? No, if it is built to connect to the system you already run rather than replace it. Get that in writing in the proposal so you can hand it over.
• What happens if we switch managers or vendors? If the site is owned by the property, nothing. If it is rented from a platform, that is worth knowing before you sign rather than after.

None of that requires you to be the expert. It requires you to have the numbers in the unit your approver thinks in, and to have already answered the objection they were going to raise.